Russian University Aims to Have PetaFLOPS Supercomputer

The chairman of the state parlament of the Russian Federation said on Friday that already this year the country’s biggest university would obtain a supercomputer with PetaFLOPs* performance. If the move is performed, this will put Lomonosov Moscow State University’s supercomputer onto at least second place in the Top 500 list of supercomputers.

"The study regarding techno-economical efficiency of a PetaFLOPS supercomputer based on the ‘Lomonosov’ supercomputer is present. I will put this matter on consideration of the president and the prime minister,” said Boris Gryzlov, the chairman of the Russian parliament, reports Cnews web-site.

At present the Lomonosov is the 12th most powerful supercomputer in the world with max performance of 350.1TeraFLOPS. At present only two supercomputers can boast with performance of excess of one PetaFLOPS – the Jaguar (1.76) and the Roadrunner (1.042), according to the Top 500 list.

The Lomonosov supercomputer located in the Moscow State Univesity is based on Intel Xeon 5570 (quad-core, 2.93GHz, 8MB of cache, Hyper-Threading). The system features 54312GB of random access memory. The upgrade plan for the system is currently unclear. A simple way would be to get additional systems into the cluster, however, it also possible to upgrade to new processors with higher clock-speed and/or amount of cores.

Total funding of the Lomonosov in 2010 from the federal budget will amount to $51.2 million. The MSU has already invested in the creation of supercomputer approximately $11.94 million. The total cost of the project at present is about $64.8 million.